Enjoy a list of my favourite songs for the month :) Although some songs are not like the others... me and someone really have different music tastes 😰 anyways this is built for fun from Animations On the Web! Sadly, it does not actually play music...

✨ Where am I on Animations On the Web?

I have recently bought the Animations On the Web course by Emil Kowalski (PPP + edu pricing is a steal...) and I was immediately blown away by the content of the course! In fact, I just got into Chapter 02: Coding Animations, How do I code Animations and could not resist the urge to build something myself...

In fact, I have started off with some simple animations for icons that animate over events, such as onClick, and I was already liking how good it felt!

I immediately opened up Figma, and started sketching some rough ideas, and came up with something, which is the <MusicPlayer/> component you saw above. The initial implementation was just okay, but I also spent a few days polishing for mobile/desktop view to suite my taste. After all, taste building is only valuable when you eventually build stuff with it!

🏗️ Thoughts on taste building

You might've built something in the past that you were not satisfied with. The way it looked wasn't great to you, or the animations weren't as good as something else you have seen before. That is a good sign because it shows your taste is good enough to tell what you are making is not quite there yet.

-- Chapter 01, Making It Feel Right

I think I have read this quote somewhere long before on Twitter I think? But this quote perfectly explained why I am so deeply unsatisfied with the software I have written ever since I started writing code 3 years ago. It has been in my mind ever since and I tell this to all my juniors. I eventually landed my first full time job as a Frontend Engineer for MoneyLion, but felt like every interface I have written was at best subpar. "But does it work?" Yeah, the code I write works, but I do not feel satisfied!

Ultimately... we just have to build more to get better! No secret trick, just build and ship, interate and improve, learn and burn with passion :) I want to surround myself with better people, so I left MoneyLion to join a quant startup which put me through hell for the first two months... but I am learning from the best now I think... let's see where I end up again in a few months!